Actually, this problem is fundamental, at least at present. We have people
walking into working groups and throwing up presentations entitled "reality
check, nobody in this room but us knows what they're talking about" and
making similar statements in very public and very private fora, when the
vendors know for certain what they have just spent or are spending a huge
amount of effort developing at very specific customer requests - in some
cases, the very networks whose employees are making those presentations -
and have deployed in customer networks that they aren't allowed to talk
about.
And guess what? Sometimes those people with the presentations are right
and the customers are wrong. Sometimes the customers are right and the
folks with the presentations are wrong. Sometimes they're both right, and
there's a fundamental (perhaps unresolvable) conflict of legitimate needs.
Sometimes they're both wrong.
There's no way we can hope to sort these things out unless we know the actual
requirements. And those aren't always the same thing as what your customer
thinks its requirements are.
But this might explain a lot of the problems we've been having over the past
few years, and so I thank you for this explanation.
I have no problem with not being able to name my customers and yet doing
for them what they tell me they want done. I do have a problem being basted
as clueless because my customer isn't standing at the mike asking for it. I
have a big problem with the level of disrespect being pushed around here.
Well, one fairly good indicator of a clueless person is when they insist that
things have to be a certain way, but seem unwilling or unable to explain why.
In a sense, a person that exhibits such behavior *is* clueless, or at least
acting that way, because they aren't able to provide any insight (i.e. clue)
into the discussion.
Perhaps the person being so accused should simply say "my customer insists
on this. I can't tell you who he is, and I can't amplify on his reasons for
insisting on this."
To which the reply should be "then your customer needs to represent his own
needs here. Because the solution your customer insists on causes problems,
and without actually having some insight into your customer's real
requirements, we have no basis on which to try to build a compromise."
Keith